In news that will shock nobody who has been following the aftermath of the April G20 protests, one of the senior officers in charge of the entire operation has been caught out lying in his evidence to a government panel, yet again. I was slightly surprised that it was Bob Broadhurst rather than Chris Allison (who seems to have been the Met's chief source of spin since the event), but both were frequently evasive and occasionally downright dishonest when they spoke at the MPA meeting immediately following the April G20, and their conduct since has been in much the same vein.

This time the lie centres around the deployment of undercover police officers at the event - something which Broadhurst explicitly denied happened when he gave evidence to the Government's select committee which was investigating these issues. Now we find that yet again, video evidence proves the police to be liars - even at the most senior level involved in the operation.

As well as the obvious issue that at best, the senior commander on this operation didn't know what kind of police were deployed as part of the operation, and at worst, he knew very well and lied about it, there is also the issue of the claim (by an MP no less) that the police had plain-clothes personnel in the crowd at the G20 protest, trying to provoke confrontations with police. I wonder if Bob's reluctance to discuss his undercover personnel with the home affair select committee could be connected to that incident?

A note here; the interesting thing is who they work for. Commander Broadhurst, who was (indeed) in command of overall operations on the day, is Met; the undercover officers were City of London Police and were apparently deployed by their own senior officers, who were not in Broadhurst's operational chain of command. This is sufficiently impolite that it would typically make an even bigger hole in relations between the two forces than already exists, but this doesn't seem to have happened.

I leave it to the reader to determine if they think this was cock-up or conspiracy; or at least, if not conspiracy, extremely well planned plausible deniability.

I've put a complaint into the IPCC about Broadhurst misleading the Home Affairs Select Committee.

Under the IPCC mandate you can complain about an officer undermining public faith and trust in the police force through a lack of honesty and integrity - I doubt the IPCC would have the balls to go after any senior officer for this type of offence (which unfortunately is hard to prove as being deliberate) but I think this continued misinformation at the top needs to be challenged.

You can see the link to the letter I sent on the link Denny Provides (thanks Denny!)